


much like suffocating

by Tanacetum



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Depression, Dissociation, Gen, recovery is a slow tedious grind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-29 19:51:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13934100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanacetum/pseuds/Tanacetum
Summary: Lup goes directly from lichdom to reaperhood. It's not a great experience, but her Queen can help her now.





	much like suffocating

Lup could slide out through the glass window at the bottom of the Reclaimers' dorm and descend to explore Faerun. She wouldn’t be missed for hours. Dawn has already breached the horizon, edging the thick clouds below in hazy orange, but her family was up well past midnight. Barry rolled back the carpet for her before he passed out on the couch. She pressed her palms and then wrists and skull through the glass, hung upside-down in the heavens. She told herself that this was _home_ , now, this was her world for the taking.

Then wind rolled clouds over the planet like a blanket. Wind that she couldn’t feel. She felt cheated—she’d only gotten to see this world in brief snatches, from the deck of the Starblaster and through the velvety walls of her prison. Her trip to the Rockseekers' vault was so long ago and had been very, very short.

She slips back into the dorm to wait. It wasn’t dark, not with the digital clock on the microwave and the glowing buttons at the elevator. Lup was too familiar with true darkness, and the walls dance and fold on the periphery of her vision.

She’d spent endless, crushing hours as a lich before. In just a few more her family would be awake again. Lup could wait. She should be good at waiting by now.

The clock ticked off another minute. On good days, when Lup wasn’t so fatigued, she could summon a magehand and read or work. She _hates_ not being able to do something with her hands. But even at her weakest she could always find company. Right now, she could find company. She may barely know the Bureau’s employees, but they know _her_. Her impossible life was broadcast into their heads. More than a hundred years of running and fighting, of pulling up roots, and she’s come full circle. Once Lup had stood on stage and declared to cameras that she was ready to leave her world behind. She has an audience again, more than a century later; people who know her, who have a chance at _understanding_. She’d been thrilled to realize that, hadn’t she?

Yesterday Lup had been reunited with her heart and her love. An army had rallied around her, only a fraction of their faces familiar. Together they’d screamed defiance at the doom of a hundred worlds and won. She has new things to think about, sitting alone in the dark.

She could go find company. She could bask in her celebrity. But at the same time, she can’t. The world around her is quiet and empty, she is quiet and empty, she floats at her brother’s kitchen table and she can’t feel the wooden chair passing straight through her. She can’t feel anything. Her limbs push against the air around her, except she does not have limbs. She’s barely aware that she’s bones and cloak and when she hugs her knees to her chest all she can feel is draping velvet.

If she could drift over to the couch she’d see Barry’s sleeping form. The rise and fall of his chest, the breath rumbling in his throat. She’s had a lot of time to think about the softness of his skin. She loved pillowing her head on his plush stomach, running fingers through the downy hairs on his chest and arms. Over the years recalling those sensations has worn deep tracks in her mind. Now they come as automatically to her as sight.

She thinks she can feel the crackle of his soul from where she floats. He’s still a lich, even bound and dormant in living flesh. She’s well-acquainted with the shape of him; edges complex and manifold, razor-thin but friable. He’s not soft, not at his core. Their whole family knows who he is, but she alone knows who he _was_. He’s not _fascinated_ with the macabre; he’s not enough of an egoist to be fascinated by thoughts as compulsive to him as breathing. Barry’s earliest and most natural assumption about the world was that morality was a sparsely-attended puppetshow against the stark backdrop of empirical reality.  He’s buried his foundations, chosen love and hope at every turn. But if she pressed ghostly claws into his throat and extinguished his fragile life, he’d embrace her and laugh. The temptation vibrates her soul like a plucked string.

Taako’s door opens and something inside her stretches taut. But it’s only his little boy, Angus, drowsiness banished when he locks eyes with her. She knows what she looks like. She’s a frisson of energy, wrapped jagged and bone-brittle beneath her red cowl.  She holds his gaze and he gulps audibly.

She should care that she’s scaring him. Maybe she should feel betrayed: how could Angus be afraid of her when she saved his life and his entire world besides? Maybe she should feel betrayed that Taako’s passed out on his bed and has left her all alone. But she did leave him first.

Barry stirs and snorts himself awake. He flops over and his wrist bounces off the coffee table. Lup winces along with him as he levers himself up to peer over the back of the couch. The panic in his eyes softens to joy when he sees her. Just like that, she’s freed. She unfolds herself and floats into his arms.

He can’t really hold her and she can’t really sleep. But she settles against him and goes quiescent. Her warped soul slides through his chest to cradle him from within. His heart slows and steadies at her touch. Lup knows this may be the happiest Barry’s ever been, that he feels reborn into a new life. He’s eager to reach out and start building. He remembers everything they’ve ever dreamed about, each flickering wish they dowsed before the Hunger could swallow it. They could finally get married—Merle or Davenport would do it, even with her undead and phantasmal.

Barry and Lup spent free shifts in his bunk on the Starblaster, cramped and cozy, outlining the life they were fighting for. They’d wanted tenure at an alien university. Lucretia could help them publish textbooks, but they were most excited to imagine their hard-won knowledge noted down by thousands of students. They’d buy a historic mansion in a welcoming downtown and enfold themselves in their new community. They’d have countless mornings to eat breakfast with Taako, afternoons of repairing and refinishing with Magnus. Lup at her best is resplendent, and she’d channel all that vibrancy into living life to its fullest. She and her family would make a home she’d never have to leave.

But now that Lup’s here, she’s not sure how to start a new life. She barely remembers being alive at all.

She lets herself drift away to the sound of Angus and Barry’s voices. They have their own nightmares to confide.

 

 

 

Lup doesn’t return to awareness until a crackling tear rends the air in front of her. She knows that it’s a reaper before she remembers her brother’s boyfriend, but even Angus reacts more quickly. He and Barry both jolt straight up from sleep, wands brandished and spells on their lips. Kravitz blinks at the sight.

“Guess I should’ve knocked, huh?” he says, stepping out of the portal. “I’d say sorry, but you’re not gonna like what comes next either.”

Barry squeezes a couch cushion through Lup’s spectral hand. She knows he wants to run. Taako’s boyfriend or not, he doesn’t trust this reaper enough to risk losing her again. He has no compunctions against defying a goddess. He’d fight a whole pantheon for his love, smother a universe, use his soul for grist in a contingency plan. She wonders who would win an outright fight between him and Kravitz.

But Lup’s done fighting. She knows she’s long since been done living, too. So even as Angus leaps off the couch to get Taako, she leans back into Barry and says, “Morning, Ghost Rider. You need us to come with you?”

 

 

She regrets it before Kravitz closes the portal behind them. Taako stumbles out of his bedroom and Kravitz’s hurried shout of “ _Sorryloveyoubebacklater_!” does nothing to soften the terror on his face. Lup sees Kravitz help Barry through with one hand in the crook of his elbow, but when the portal closes she’s alone.

Her awareness collapses inwards. Her cloak and bones have vanished, leaving her balled-up soul hanging fragile as a soap bubble. This isn’t a cage, she tells herself. There are no walls of velvet curtains. She’s not trapped here any more than a leaf floating on the surface of a still pond is trapped. She settles into the isolation, lets it dampen her mind.

Without the facsimile of a body, she has no drive to force her senses to extend. There’s nothing to perceive anyway—she’s the only thing in this space. She feels a prickle of frustration but it ebbs away before she can turn her full attention to it.

Lup’s felt like herself too briefly this past decade. Her only company was the steady drip of cave water until Taako found her—but he hadn’t, he’d _forgotten_. She’d had long nights where she could imagine escaping from the umbrella but not her brother remembering her. She wasn’t herself without him, but she’d be free all the same. She would have to become someone else to him. She daydreamed scenarios: first with palpable grief, then with the wistfulness of faint hope, and then with no emotion at all.

She has Taako back now, but she thinks her jokes have been falling flat. She only knew how to be herself when she fought the Hunger. Hard not to; she and Barry wove both their love for each other and their desperation for triumph into their souls. She should have gone down fighting as a lich every cycle the way Merle threw himself back into parley. She doesn’t remember what held her back.

She realizes, dimly, that she needs to get back to Taako. That the terror he must feel is beyond her imagining. But she fought for a decade, turned her whole being towards rescuing him even when casting simple magic sapped her dry. He remembers her now. It’s his turn to save her, and she trusts him to do it.

If she deserves to be saved. Lup doesn’t trust her judgment.  She’s the author of every hurt she’s borne. She turned herself into a lich, crafted her own perfect prison, then threw herself in and locked the door behind. She’s worn sick of herself.

 

 

And then there’s a presence there with her, a pressing, dull chill turning over her soul. She throws herself open under its attention, tissue-thin layers flaking away.  It sees her. It knows her. The Raven Queen resolves in iridescent black and whispering feathers, and Lup drifts to her like a wisp.

The Raven Queen is a goddess of cycles, of endings rewritten perpetually. Lup can suddenly feel her domain, and it’s suffused with the stillness and mustiness of quiet decay. An uncountable multitude of souls lingers out of view, disused and languid and waiting. Like an archive of a billion lives preserved and sitting unread.

The Raven Queen extends a formless hand and Lup feels and sees and knows her too. The goddess has been crushed under the weight of others for eons. The burden rests gracefully on her shoulders. Shedding it would be unthinkable. She doesn’t understand what it means to be overwhelmed; everything matters to her, but so very little rises to her attention. It’s all grist in the end. Every speck of love and loss forgotten and reenacted, ad infinitum. Only a handful of real tragedies remain; the loss of souls from her cycle, to utter destruction or fates far worse. An attempt made to devour her reality. Lup is shocked to realize that the Raven Queen feels that she owes her.

Anything that the Raven Queen has felt something for, any joy or sorrow, will come to her again and again. Each of those little visits feels like less over time. But she reaches out for Lup anyway.

Lup doesn’t entertain the thought of saying no. She’s not sure what she’s desperate for, but there’s little she feels as strongly as the need to be encompassed by something greater than herself. She needs something to fight for. Her Queen slides into her and settles behind her eyes and _oh_ , she has eyes again. Her soul knits bones and flesh and linen and she’s standing in a black cloak—no, _red_ , her Queen bleeds the color down from her shoulders until she’s a flame in the darkness. Lup thinks her feet should feel like they’re touching the floor and they do.

It’s with quiet awe that Lup feels her soul relax and be soothed beneath a sheath of ice. She thought she could only feel this alert in battle anymore. Lup now has her Queen’s understanding that she’s years past her final death. She lost something real and important when Cyrus’s dagger sliced silverpoint into her veins. She was lost even before that, when she and Barry cleaved their souls and warped themselves to a fixed purpose.

Her life can’t be restored. She’ll never be herself again. But, more importantly—she’s not alone.

 

 

Lup’s not really standing in a chamber, but the walls and floor that don’t exist leave her with the impression of black marble. She doesn’t feel cold. She’s not drifting; her Queen’s presence anchors her, melded seamlessly with her own awareness. Kravitz is at her shoulder—has been this whole time, but his soul felt so much like their Queen’s that it was all a blur to Lup.

Barry’s there, wearing a younger face than he went to bed with. He gives her a sheepish grin. Lup feels a distant twinge of amusement—he’d kicked up a fuss, of course he had, driven by fury and fear. His soul is clearer to her than it’s ever been, but she doesn’t feel it the same way. They’re both transformed. He’s under the pall of the Raven Queen too, the rotting, consuming fervor of his magic restrained and stifled.

She’s so, so glad he took the deal with her. She’d been sure he would, but hadn’t hoped. Lup looks into his eyes and sees the same shadowy presence in her mind reflected back.

 

 

Lup goes through the portal before Kravitz, a calculated move to stave off Taako’s fury. In the minutes they’ve been gone he’s streaked tears all down his front. He leaps up from the couch when he sees her so forcefully that he knocks Magnus away. She gathers him in her arms and smooths his hair. He’s fever-hot and wholly unfamiliar against her. He cries himself out on her cloak and then bears down on Kravitz. Barry shuffles over to keep Angus company and they watch as Taako tears off his boyfriend’s tie and blows his nose with it. Lup laughs and means it.

Magnus decides he’s up for the day and leaves for the dojo. He gives Lup and Barry his room with a wink and they take him up on his offer. Taako whisks Angus and Kravitz off to the cafeteria like he doesn’t think his own kitchen is superior. They’ve decided to throw a reunion party tonight, and Taako says he wants to make all her favorites. Lup wonders what he thinks those are.

Barry and Lup take Magnus’s bed and fuck mechanically for less than a minute before giving up. Barry says the stillness of his construct body unnerves him. He can’t get over how he’s not _in_ flesh, just inhabiting it. He says it feels too much like possessing a golem, something they’re aware they can do now. They’re also aware they’ll get used to it. Barry’s heartbeat stutters sluggishly, his pulse a faint trickle, and she can’t tell how cold his hand is because hers is the same. Lup hadn’t noticed the little differences between undeath and life. She punches one of Magnus’s pillows until it flattens and feels something like relief.

They change Magnus’s sheets and wash mountains of Taako’s dirty laundry while they’re at it. Lup can’t believe that she remembers how to care for silk charmeuse. It’s not knowledge from her Queen—she stirs behind Lup’s eyes. She likes the luster of the weave. Lup will buy a gown for her later.

Taako and Angus come back while she’s still elbow-deep in suds at the sink. She freezes when she sees him. He’s put a glamour on to restore the beauty he lost in Wonderland and he still looks nothing like her. She’d thought her new body was crafted to appear as it had during their stolen century. Now she has to wonder about her face, and Barry’s. Taako rushes to her and cries in her arms _again_. Meanwhile, Lup’s Queen promises her that she does look the same as he remembers, even if she doesn’t recognize herself.

Taako notices that her heart doesn’t beat. He’s used to that from Kravitz, and skates past the revelation the same instant he says it. He tells her the laundry can keep for a while longer and drags everyone off to the dojo. The Raven Queen approves that she’s going. She’ll need the practice for her duties.

He tugs her by the hand and Lup’s crushed under such nostalgia that she wishes she’d cried for him. _All things in time_.

 

 

Lup goes through the motions and plays her own strings. She roughhouses with Magnus, she teases Merle, she tickles Angus until he cries laughing, she kisses Barry, and none of these things reach her core. She feels tingles of warmth, but mostly she feels the icy rock at her center where her Queen’s presence nests and lingers. She’s paid less and less of the goddess’s attention as the days pass, but Lup’s soul will always be entwined with her. She’s only ever a thought away.

Barry wakes up to find her meditating in the night, not sleeping, wrapped in the awareness of their Queen’s presence—the only thing she’s found that can center her, pull her back from the brink of dissolution. He doesn’t need to ask her what’s going on, not when their Queen knows. Lup urges him back to sleep. He tugs her legs under his head and she strokes his hair in her lap the whole night. He’s warm against her. They still haven’t made love.

 

 

Taako looks at Kravitz and blushes and preens and giggles and flirts. Taako doesn’t see the Raven Queen behind his eyes or in the lines of his shoulders, even though that’s all Lup can feel when she looks at him. Little by little, Kravitz and Barry come to be like Lup’s own soul to her. They’re all extensions of their Queen’s will, and Barry and Lup learn to move in sync with Kravitz on the battlefield instead of in his orbit.

Sometimes they catch themselves gazing after Taako in eerie unison, heads following his every motion. He’s so vibrant, so reactive. He’s always cared more fiercely than he can stand. Lup has forgotten how he manages to take endless pleasure in things like pretty outfits and nice food. The Raven Queen is fascinated. Taako never brings it up, but Angus grows practiced at distracting each of them in turn. Lup’s beginning to see why Taako loves him.

Lup acts more like herself these days, even though she now knows what it feels like to look at Taako dispassionately and imagine him picked apart. Sometimes she shies from alien thoughts in her head. But she can’t stop yanking on her tether to the Raven Queen, can’t let the line go slack for even a moment. There's no forgetting that she's an emissary now, an aspect of her Queen, but she’s not ready for even a pretense of independence—of loneliness. The prospect terrifies her.

 

 

Taako corners her one night. His eyes are watery and wavering as he stares into hers like he’s trying to see her soul. He doesn’t need to tell her that he’s just had a fight with Kravitz. Lup’s not sure what she thinks. She knows what her Queen thinks: Taako’s lovely and mortal, endlessly amusing, exactly the kind of treasure she protects the cycle for, and Kravitz wasn’t careful enough with him.

Taako used to be Lup’s core. Maybe he can be again, she’s reassured. He does say he wants her to know she can tell him anything.

Lup doesn’t have a smile for him, so she entreats her Queen to tug the corners of her lips up. She’s sure she’ll be fine. All things in time.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as always to [ distractedkat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/distractedKat/profile)


End file.
